Profile

One of pop'n music's most frequent composers, Kiyoshi Murai's history with Konami dates back to as early as the early 1990's, where he started off doing music for various Mega Drive games and music tracks for the then popular Tokimeki Memorial Vocal CDs, as well as the 1998 Red Company-developed RPG / dating simulation Mitsumete Knight. His first project for BEMANI was the 1999 pop'n stage ex, an updated release of pop'n stage with two new songs, one of them being his song WE TWO ARE ONE that was soon ported to pop'n music 4. Since pop'n music 4 he has appeared in every arcade entry. His style of music tends to drift more into a 1980's synth sound (as seen in his V.C.O. and ALT songs), though he's also dabbled occasionally in rock and orchestral sounding music as well.

Kiyoshi also served as head sound director of 4 and 5, as well as being the co-director of KEYBOARDMANIA 2ndMIX with Naya~n and head sound director of KEYBOARDMANIA 3rdMIX, the final entry in the series. After pop'n music 5, fellow BEMANI composer Jun Wakita would handle the sound direction of pop'n music with pop'n music 6, though he continued to sound direct various pop'n music entries up to PARTY♪. Kiyoshi also contributed new songs to beatmania IIDX beginning with DistorteD for years, and was the sound producer of the ミライダガッキ FutureTomTom series.

Sometime around late 2017, Kiyoshi was transferred from Konami Amusement to the Konami Digital Entertainment department.

Trivia

Prior to his full name being revealed in 2019, Kiyoshi had stated in an interview with the Japanese website Gpara.com that his commonly used "Seiya" alias wasn't his real first name.

Kiyoshi's V.C.O. alias is an abbreviation for "Voltage Controlled Orchestra".

This alias is most likely a reference to Murai's favorite band, Yellow Magic Orchestra, which is often abbreviated as YMO.

Famous KONAMI composers Michiru Yamane and Miki Higashino were Kiyoshi's seniors in the same department as him when he first joined KONAMI in the 1990's.

The song comments for A SHOOTING STAR note how one of Kiyoshi's first sound specific jobs at KONAMI was making new sound effects for the PC Engine Super CD ports of some of KONAMI's games, like GRADIUS II.